Chapter 2
Lirael
I heard them before I saw them: the heavy tread of boots on undergrowth, the crackle of radios, the sharp commands that meant they were coordinating, closing in, cutting off my escape routes with the kind of practiced efficiency that came from hunting down desperate creatures on a regular basis.
Fuck.
The first guard came at me from the left, bursting through a curtain of hanging moss with his shock baton raised. I didn't think—just reacted, my body remembering every self-defense move I'd taught myself during three years of captivity. I dropped low, letting his swing pass over my head, and drove my shoulder into his midsection with enough force to knock the air from his lungs.
He went down hard, and I was already moving, already running, but there were more of them, so many more, converging on my position like wolves on wounded prey.
No. No, I didn't come this far just to get dragged back—
The second guard was smarter, or maybe just more experienced. He didn't come at me head-on, just moved to block my path, his hands spread wide like he was trying to corral a skittish animal. "Easy now," he said, his voice maddeningly calm. "Nobody needs to get hurt here. Just come back with us nice and quiet, and we'll forget this ever happened."
Liar, I thought viciously. You'll drag me back to that cell and they'll pump me so full of sedatives I won't remember my own name, and then they'll start the extractions again, and this time they won't be gentle about it.
I feinted right, watched his weight shift to compensate, then broke left so fast I felt something in my knee protest. Pain shot up my leg but I ignored it, ignored everything except the desperate need to keep moving, to stay free just a little bit longer.
My bare feet found purchase on slick stone as the jungle began to thin, the dense canopy giving way to rocky terrain that meant I was getting close to the island's edge. North, Damian had said. Head north to the cliffs. There's a boat hidden in a cave at the base—old emergency evacuation craft that's been off the books for years. It's your best shot at getting off this island alive.
Behind me, I heard the guards regrouping, heard their radios crackling with updates and coordinates. They were herding me, I realized with a sick jolt. Pushing me toward the cliffs where there would be nowhere left to run, where they could corner me against the ocean and take me back like the prize specimen I was.
No. There has to be another way. There has to be—
The jungle opened up ahead of me, the dense vegetation giving way to a clearing bathed in moonlight, and I felt a surge of desperate hope. The North Cliff. I'm almost there. Just a little further—
I burst into the clearing and immediately knew something was wrong.
The plateau wasn't empty. Someone was here—a tall figure silhouetted against the moonlight, standing perfectly still in the center of what I now recognized as a carefully arranged shrine. White flowers—irises, I thought distantly, the kind that symbolized remembrance—formed a circle around a flat stone that served as an altar, and on that altar sat an expensive-looking bottle of amber liquid, its glass catching the moonlight like captured fire.
Oh, shit.
I tried to stop, tried to dig my heels in and reverse course, but momentum and exhaustion betrayed me. My foot caught on a root I hadn't seen, my body pitched forward, and suddenly I was falling, my hands outstretched to catch myself as I crashed directly into the shrine like the world's most unwelcome wrecking ball.
The bottle went first, toppling off the altar with a sound that seemed impossibly loud in the quiet night. I heard it shatter against stone, smelled the sharp bite of expensive whiskey as it soaked into the earth, and then my shoulder connected with the flower arrangement and sent white irises scattering like snow across blood-dark stone.
No. No, please, not like this—
I scrambled to my hands and knees, my heart hammering so hard I thought it might crack my ribs, and that's when I felt it: a presence behind me that made every instinct I possessed scream danger in a pitch so high it was almost beyond hearing. The air itself seemed to thicken, to press down on me with a weight that had nothing to do with atmospheric pressure and everything to do with the predator currently staring at the back of my neck.
For a long moment, there was only silence—the kind of silence that precedes violence, that holds the promise of pain in every stretched second. Then I heard footsteps, slow and deliberate, circling around to where I could see them.
"Do you know," a voice said—cultured, controlled, and absolutely glacial with fury—"what you've just destroyed?"
I looked up slowly, every movement careful and deliberate, my hands still pressed against stone as I met the eyes of the man I'd interrupted.
Oh, fuck me sideways.
He was beautiful in the way predators are beautiful—all sharp edges and cold symmetry, pale skin that seemed to glow in the moonlight, features so perfectly sculpted they looked almost artificial. Dark hair fell across his forehead in a way that should have softened his appearance but somehow only made him look more dangerous, and his eyes—Christ, his eyes—were amber like a wolf's, burning with an intelligence and rage that made my stomach drop straight through the stone beneath me.
But it was the way he held himself that really terrified me: perfectly still, perfectly controlled, like a drawn bow waiting to loose its arrow. This wasn't some mindless brute I could outthink or outmaneuver. This was something infinitely worse—a predator who was also smart, also calculating, also playing a game I didn't understand.
Alpha werewolf, some distant part of my brain supplied with clinical detachment. Old bloodline, probably one of the Triad families, definitely someone you do NOT want to piss off, and congratulations, you absolute idiot, you just destroyed what was clearly a very important memorial to someone he loved.